I have no idea who this post is directed at, as no one on earth seems to be advocating for a replication of the Bund as it existed in Tsarist Russia, and no one fails to recognize that the conditions in the U.S. are not comparable to those in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire.
It feels absurd to even have to type that. The fact is, in 2026, anti-Zionist American Jews, as well as Zionist American Jews who are appalled by the behavior of the Israeli state, are regularly smeared as antisemitic, self-loathing monsters who have been indoctrinated to sever their ties with their Jewishness and the history of their people. A new history of the (largely forgotten) Bund is timely in that it situates Anti-Zionism firmly in the European Jewish tradition and expands our collective understanding of the debates and fissures that persist to this day. I fail to see the downside in engaging with and finding inspiration in a long-ignored but consequential chapter in the history of European and Russian Jewry.
Well, it's possible it was just directed at me -- in which case it won't do very well!
I totally understand the emotional appeal of dissociating oneself from the appalling behavior of the Israeli state, which is currently governed by a coalition that includes outright fascists and which I fear is careening down the slope toward self-destruction.
I just think a politics rooted in that desire for emotional dissociation is a complete and total dead end, and I tried to articulate why. I appear to have done a lousy job!
The downside is that it’s a product of narcissistically organized American Jews, and does absolutely nothing to influence Israeli Jews who will decide the future of Zionism. Those are very significant downsides indeed.
‘Narcissistically organized’ is quite an oxymoron.
The current trajectory of Israeli nationalism is suicidal. Permanent militarism is a sickness of the spirit. Every oppressor in history has claimed victimhood to justify their atrocities. Good luck and may God have mercy on your soul
Who is defending Israeli nationalism? This is a post about “Neo-Bundism” and you’re just repeating phrases relating to Israel that have nothing to do with what’s being discussed. Also, I don’t think you know what oxymoron means.
Imagine if you are a left leaning Israeli in 2026. You’ve almost certainly had family members who died protecting the country or in terrorist attacks, and your grandparents came from Holocaust era Europe or middle eastern countries where Jews were viewed as second class citizens. Now, an American Jew, who was lucky enough to get into that country before it shut its doors, is lecturing you about Bundism, which was a total failure. How is that supposed to help you change the direction of Israel?
A soldier I trained lived in the Gaza envelope. He was a serious socialist and backed his son's refusal to be drafted into the IDF. And then both of them had to fight for their lives against a couple truckloads of Hamas commandos invading their village to massacre and abduct its civilians. Nobody has killed the Israeli left, which I used to vote fore, like the Palestinians. In Israel the term regarding the failed peace process, where every land for peace withdrawal was followed by massive terrorism costing thousands of dead and wounded is "sobering up". October 7 2023 has sobered up even the majority of the Israeli socialist left. The ones living in delusion are Anzi progressive Jews of the diaspora, but then again it's no different than the biggest "communists" during the 60s being intellectuals living in Western Europe and the US, who would never, ever move to a Soviet dominated communist country.
The progressive left is just too many retarded rich kids who cosplay being socialist, with no clue of living in a state of war. Moralizing from afar like true dickheads.
The question is what comes next. Do you think annexing Area C and leaving A and B as geographically isolated Bantustans is a good idea? To be fair , I share your skepticism that even a geographically contiguous state would be accepted by the Palestiniains, but the world community would, and if it attacked we would bomb the hell of out of it.
The main thing people misunderstand about Bundism is that besides its socialist commitments it was primarily a Jewish nationalist movement, dedicated to advancing Jewish national interests; Leon Trotsky called them "Zionists with sea-sickness". Such a combination wasn't uncommon in Tsarist Russia, where the main parties advocating for Polish, Ukrainian, Georgian, etc. indepence also professed socialist ideals. But besides American Jews not constituting a distinct national group for which it makes sense to have a nationalist movement, the Neo-Bundists seem to view their movement primarily as a vehicle for solidarity with other people, particularly Palestinians, and not as a vehicle for advancing Jewish interests even with they conflict with the interestst of others.
Indeed, it was the Bund's nationalism that led Lenin to oppose its application to join the Russian Social Democratic Party as an affiliated national organization in the 1903 vote that divided the party into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.
I think this piece is missing the most crucial point. This "neo-Bundist" moment is driven by a (entirely correct) argument: the centrality of literal Zionism (as in we must take Jerusalem like David took it from the Canaanites) to Jewish life and identity is ahistorical, that for centuries millions of Jews in the diaspora lived and acted with profound indifference to Zionism. I mean, I'm partial to Bundism for obvious reasons. But totally irrespective of the specifics of socialist anti-Zionism, you've got this larger distortion of Jewish history that suggests that essentially every Jew has been dreaming of a return to Palestine since the fall of the second temple. That's not only not true, it's propaganda dreamt up by modern Zionists to support their efforts. The idea that Zionism is a simple continuation of ancient Jewish identity is held by many people, most of them not Jewish. But modern Zionism is less than 200 years old. It's like the Star of David and the assumption that it's the ancient symbol of the Jewish people, a retconning design to support specific political purposes.
If you had asked the average Jew living in New York in 1900 if he was dedicated to the cause of returning to the Holy Land, he would have likely said "...what?" And that stance, the very common stance of indifference to Zionism even within Jewish culture and identity, has been essentially erased thanks to concerted efforts to erase it. But it's crucial context for these debates about Bundism.
The world only spins forward, Freddie, so I think nostalgic anti-Zionist ideologies are a literal waste of time.
That doesn’t mean you have to be a Zionist, whatever that might mean now -- and as you know, I don't think it's obvious what it means, which is a major reason why I am reluctant to call myself a Zionist and why I think more people should be circumspect about applying ideological labels to themselves. It means that, whatever you’re arguing, you’re arguing in the wake of Zionism having succeeded in its primary aims. The next turn is forward from there -- whatever direction you go.
How American Jews should relate to the largest Jewish community in the world and to a state that calls itself a Jewish state are a really good questions to debate. I absolutely do not think that self-professed Zionists get to put a gate on those discussions! But *that* is the subject — not “was this is a good idea in the first place.”
Apart from that, I don't think you're right that for centuries Jews were indifferent to Zionism. Jews could only be indifferent to or attracted to Zionism *once modern Zionism was a thing* -- which is to say, in the modern era. If you go back before modernity, you have to go back to a pre-modern mentality more generally.
Were the Jews caught up in the 17th century cult of Shabtai Zvi "indifferent" to the prospect of returning to the Land of Israel? Not at all! They thought he was the messiah and was going to lead them there miraculously!
Does that mean they were Zionists? No! It means they were pre-modern Jews -- a particular group thereof, mind you. I am not suggesting they were representative in some way of the vast diversity of pre-modern Jewish life.
But, again, it doesn't matter. The world only spins forward.
It’s only ahistorical if you consider that Jewish history ended in 1920. But it didn’t and now in the year 2026, Israel exists. The neo-Bundists want to wage some theoretical battle against “Zionism” as if the rest of the 20th century didn’t happen. They are relitigating an intra-Jewish fight that has been asked and answered by history. Even if you or I don’t like the fact that Israel exists, it does; it’s a real place, with real people, who have a language and culture of their own and passports and a military with big bombs that they drop on Palestinians.
So the question for diaspora Jews *now* is how they should relate to the fact of Israel’s existence, and the neo-Bundists response is very much *not* indifference, but rather a kind of inchoate rage and despair at the mere existence of Israel and Israelis (this is, like, the whole point). Want to restart the Bund? Ok — tell us, what your vision is! And remember, it can’t be As a Jew style antizionism, in which Israel remains the entire frame of reference for your identity. These people are the mirror image of the kneejerk Zionists they hate so much.
The backward-looking nostalgia of the neo-Bundists is what ultimately unites them with the most illiberal blood and soil currents of the Palestine solidarity movement. Say what you will about Palestinian fascists though, at least there’s a fantasy of a glorious nation to return to. What do the neo-Bundists want to return to? The week before Hitler’s invasion of Poland? It’s a very unique, 2020s Jewish American kind of mania to imagine the former glory of your people as the moment before they were practically annihilated.
I’ll begin by reiterating Reggie’s question, and no, you didn’t do a bad job of answering it Noah, your academic byway through the obvious was informative and you arrived at the obvious answers.
The Crabapple book is much better than its unfortunate marketing campaign to the AsAJews would suggest, a very straightforward by-the-numbers history, and has very little in common with the bizarre Third Period Stalinist cartoon of Benjamin Balthasser, which frankly is the beginning and end of the idea of the usable past held by Jewish Currents and its circle, which I believe is who you had in mind as prospective serious “neo-Bundists.”
I happen to be right at the relevant moment to all this in my current book project - a history of Menorah Journal, which I’d love the opportunity Noah to discuss with you some time and is very relevant to the larger questions about the American Jewish present and future you raise. What I would say in short is that anyone reading the many dispatches from Europe in the journal from the end of WWI into the rise of the Nazis would have seen the Jewish future there as nothing but bleak, and that the interwar Bund and territorialists had few if any illusions that they weren’t merely advocating a stopgap program for just a fraction of world Jewry going forward.
Finally, just one point of my prickliness over your past cavalier attitude about my first book (and the Menorah Journal book should answer those criticisms of so many moons ago and then some!), on at least one occasion before his death in 1900 Isaac Mayer Wise all but literally verbatim said “the world only spins forward” regarding Herzl et al.
In a recent conversation wrt the new Crabapple book's publication an academic historian (who may or may not be a mutual acquaintance) pointed out that the Bund was non-Zionist not anti-Zionist.
Excellent interview with Molly Crabapple on the Know Your Enemy podcast (one of the best podcasts). Check it out.
I'll start with a quibble: The US and Israel have almost identical Jewish populations, the estimates intersect.
I think Millman misunderstands Crabapple's project. She is not trying to start some sort of neo-Bundism, so the very different circumstances of current US and pre-WW1 E. European jewry is not relevant. She is, to use her own word, obsessed with the history, and she reports young US Jews find it fascinating. I'm a 66 year old US gentile and I find it fascinating as well. Educated people my age know the Warsaw uprising happened, but not necessarily much more than that. It doesn't surprise me that younger people know still less and find it interesting. From the article Millman links to: "Especially young Jews, like in their 20s. They had no idea that Jews had fought back in Europe even before the Holocaust, or they had only vague ideas about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and that Bundists played a major role in it. It was very meaningful for them."
You do not have to share material circumstances with your ancestors to be surprised and inspired by them! Today people are surprised and inspired by ancient Israel, a place with material circumstances far more remote than late 19th century urban Odessa is to us.
Another quote from the article: "Yes. A lot of them were sold a bill of goods about their history, and when they reject that bill of goods, there’s a big hole in them. They don’t have any actual, positive Jewish history. They just have shit they’re ashamed of, because they realize [that Zionism] was actually a history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. One of the things my book does is give them ancestors."
Perhaps Millman, instead of focusing on differences in material circumstances should think more deeply about the problem Israeli policies are creating among our young. I have a 15-year old son attending a very liberal and diverse high school in Seattle (Franklin). I am shocked by anti-semitism I hear from his friends, and even from my son, I regret to confess. I have to explain that Gaza was not destroyed by "the Jews" but by a very bad man (Netanyahu) leading a country that is blinded by rage. Now he sees Israel intent on bombing the shit out of Iran and S. Lebanon, and he just asked me about a phrase he heard, "mowing the lawn" (ouch). When I explained Zionism to him his first question was (I'll paraphrase) 'OK, so why don't Palestinians get their own country too, the bible?' (He can be snarky).
This is the world our young are experiencing, the idea that learning about the Bund and the Warsaw uprising is irrelevant because they were poor and we are rich seems... Inadequate.
Finally Molly Crabapple attends to the question Millman asks "I would love to understand what significance the Neo-Bundists attribute to the fact that the original Jewish Bund was a total failure". I will point out that losing a good fight doesn't mean you have nothing to teach. We have nothing to learn from the First Jewish-Roman War of 66-73 AD? Masada means nothing because it failed?
Beyond this obvious point I'll pass on what Molly Crabapple said in the interview: Palestine was an English colony! It isn't 550km from Berlin! Had Rommel won at El Alamein all the Jews in mandatory Palestine would have been exterminated just as ruthlessly! The idea that Zionists were right and Bundists were wrong is not proven by a contingent history with vastly larger forces at play where the happy fact that Palestine was strategically important and controlled by a powerful enemy of the Nazis, allied with an America with vast factories beyond the reach of Nazi bombers! History does not offer such simple lessons.
Lots to interact with here! I'll barely scratch the surface.
First, I may regret writing this before reading the book. If so, I'll post a follow-up after I've read it.
Relatedly, as someone who while in middle school wrote a play about Emanuel Ringelblum, I certainly do think it's a good idea to know history! But I may also have a distorted perspective about what people do or don't know already about their own history.
As for Masada: I do not like the cult of Masada! The Jewish revolt was a disaster, and sadly the Jews, in possession of sovereignty once again, have managed to unlearn the most important lessons of that disaster.
And as for WWII: I said nothing at all about the Zionists being vindicated by it. I said American liberalism was vindicated for having prevented America from going totalitarian, as so much of the world did in the 1930s. You are right, of course, that all of history is contingent -- if Japan had attacked the Soviet Union along with Nazi Germany, instead of attacking Pearl Harbor and bringing America fully into the fight, the Axis might have won the war. Who knows? But what's the case that the Bund succeeded anywhere, or might have succeeded?
Finally: I may have the wrong ideas about what to do about it, but I think a lot about how to deal with the effect Israel's policies are having on young people's attitudes toward Jews. I think there's a limit to what Jews in America can do about that. They can try to change the attitudes of Israelis, which requires interacting with them, not cutting them off, and would at best have only a very slow effect. They can engage openly with people who have inclined to tip over into antisemitism, hard though that always is, and again, that would at best have a very slow effect. They can invest more deeply in an *actual* Jewish identity, which is why I suggested going to shul, so that they have an internal strength to deal with antisemitism and to respond to it constructively.
There are also heroic things they could do, like volunteering to monitor human rights abuses in the West Bank, but the overwhelming majority of people won't be heroes. I'm not a hero myself. I admire very much people willing to actually put their bodies on the line in that way. I don't think they would do that without an investment in the Jewish people, and in the fate of Israel. So, again, dissociation probably isn't going to get you there.
Anyway -- if learning about the Bund helps young Jews appreciate the complexity of Jewish history, God bless. I'm in favor of that. I just don't think the Bund is a model for anything particularly useful going forward. It's a failed solution to the problems of a very different time. The Zionist solution to those problems struck most Jews as crazy at the time -- but it *was* a response to those problems, and a coherent one.
As my expereince with my son and his friends shows, learning about the Bund can help young non-Jews as well.
Israel's actions should not feed anti-semitism among our young any more than being anti-Putin justifies hating Russians, but it does. Stereotyping is the way our minds work, it takes continual effort to fight. Human nature being what it is, what to do? The reason my son and his friends care about Gaza more than the Sudan Civil War is US support. US bombs were dropped on apartment buildings. The current Iran War is a US/Israel co-production. There is a lot of reporting that Netanyahu plays Trump to get his way. Various states punish contractors who support BDS.
My explanation to my son, that the US and Israel have far and away the largest Jewish populations, that communal attachment is natural, is utterly unsatisfactory to him. I see it as natural, he says wrong is wrong, it isn't like he doesn't have a point.
A foreign policy that makes aid and alliance with Israel conditional on a sincere committment to a two-state-solution peace process would be the single most effective way to stop the advance of anti-semitism among our young. With Israeli support for a two-state solution polling below 30% such a policy change would effectively end military aid and close military/intelligence ties for years while we wait and hope the Israeli public has a change of heart. That would really take the juice out of expanding left-wing anti-semitism. Israeli bad acts would be seen as the actions of a rogue state, a them thing, not an us thing.
I really don't mean to pick on you, I'm just endlessly shocked about how much propaganda and outright lying has completely warped any clear understanding of this 100-year-old conflict.
To even say something like "[Zionism] was actually a history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid" should mark you as a brainwashed conduit of campus-Left/Soviet Union propaganda, not as any kind of thinker, writer or NYT font of wisdom. This is like letting other people describe you with words written by your worst enemy—light on truth, but packed with hatred. And the same goes for: 'OK, so why don't Palestinians get their own country too?'
All these have simple answers, if people only stepped out of their partisan postures and loyalties and tribal information silos. The "apartheid" smear is of course an obvious lie (originated by the Soviets) and has never been made as any kind of fact claim, but as a moral weapon meant to smear and delegitimize Israel. There is no "apartheid" in Israel (apartheid being a specifically South African system based on racial castes that don't exist in Israel), in fact Israel is the only place in the ME where Arabs have any civil rights and Arabs there live and serve freely in the military, in govt etc. (And that doesn't even include the Ethiopian and other Jews who've found havens there.) And the simple reason they built their "apartheid" wall is that before it was built, suicide bombers were pouring in from the WB to blow themselves up on buses, in clubs and restaurants and murdered 1k Israeli civilians.
And whatever "ethnic cleansing" took place was all a part of the mass shuffling of millions of humans as all world govts were rearranged post-WW2. The Palestinians (a name that didn't exist then) were no more "ethnic cleansed" than were Indians and Pakistanis or the Sudeten Germans or the Christians who were expelled from Turkey, not to mention the 850k Jews expelled from their homes throughout the ME. The only difference is that the Palestinians have refused to move on and prefer to be 4th-generation refugees, to keep hope alive that one day they can reverse the humiliation they felt at the successful establishment of Israel and have their own state "from the river to the sea". There is no "apartheid" and no "ethnic cleansing", these are wicked lies no sane adult should repeat.
And the questions about "So why don't Palestinians get their own country too" and "[Israel's] sincere committment to a two-state-solution peace process" have the same answer. Israel has tried on multiple occasions across decades to make peace with the Palestinians (just in the recent past were Rabin's Contour-for-Peace in 1995, the 2000 Ehud Barak/Clinton peace offer (95% of the WB and all of Gaza!), then Barak’s offer at Taba and Olmert's famous napkin in 2008—all rejected sans counteroffer). I know it's hard for Western liberals to accept this, but the truth has been stated clearly by every Palestinian leader from Hitler's Mullah Hajj Amin al-Husseini to Arafat and Sinwar etc—they don't want their own state, they want to DESTROY the Jewish state. And these aren't my words, but theirs. Every peacenik in the world applauded when Israel abandoned Gaza in 2007 and look how that turned out. 10/7 didn't happen because the Palestinians DIDN'T have their own state, but because they DID.
How can you make a peace deal with someone who doesn't want peace? The only possible response that would appease the Islamic Jew haters and their Western allies (not to to mention the progressive Reform aristocrats of the NYT) would be for Israel to dissolve itself. And thus the conflict continues...
I’m sympathetic to the desire for a diaspora Jewish identity not centered on the state of Israel, pro or con. Viewing bundism as an example does demonstrate that such a thing could potentially exist; viewing it as a model strikes me as a sad and backward facing endeavor.
You do know that the Bund was eliminated by both the Nazis and Soviets, essentially making the Zionist case for the Zionists. The few Holocaust surviving Bundist members mostely made sought refuge in Israel, and admitted they were wrong. I recommend Samuel J Hyde's "What Does Judaism Look Like With Bundism?" https://sjhyde.substack.com/p/what-does-judaism-look-like-with
Yes I do know that and do not look for a reconstitution of the Bund or Bundishness, as I stated. I do look for a diaspora Jewish existence of cultural and religious substance whose members do not live vicariously through the state of Israel. Call me an Ahad ha Amist. I want a healthy relationship between Israel and diaspora in which each can feed off each other. That relationship does not now exist.
This is a really fascinating post that I think engages with the issue pretty fairly. At the very end I think you get to an interesting place about why the Bund is attractive in a way that lot of leftist spaces is not, which is that those in the more communist strains can behave violently towards cultural heritage. Additionally, I think part of the reason people are attracted to stories of the Bund is that we do feel alienated from our Jewishness, and we want to have cultural connection that is not pushing an agenda that we don’t agree with. I personally like religious Judaism! I enjoy the prayers and I live a religious life, but I also feel a little uncomfortable shoehorning politics into religious spaces, so applying Bundist principles helps me reconnect with a Jewish history that is authentically Jewish but not cosmopolitan. This rejects some things about the United States that many of us have issues with, but also reject certain aspects of Zionist thought that many of us have issues with.
Ultimately, trying to replicate the wounded seems disconnected from reality, but mining their theory and practice for applicable principles seems very appropriate. I also am not married to “the Bund” but I am committed to the principles of solidarity with other oppressed groups and living in my Jewish heritage without being deracinated, as well as pursuing like-minded communities.
"I haven't read this book, but have a lot of opinions about people who I imagine have read this book and what I imagine their opinions are about lots of things. I'm going to write a response to these people in my imagination for my buddies and I to feel smug about".
Great post. People seem to forget that Workmen's Circle is right there, or maybe a "No, not like that" mindset kicks in. Neo-Bundists are theater kids to a person, and not in a good way.
My experience, Zionist or no (I agree with you on the limited usefulness of this term in a world where Israel already exists), but someone who doesn’t support many of the recent actions of the Israeli state, is being told by friends and relatives that I am an antisemite and not a real Jew. Since Im not a believer and can “pass”, the question of whether the only function of me claiming a Jewish identity is just being a useful idiot for virulent antisemites is one I worry about myself, too! So I take a history of the Bund not as a model for action today, but as reassurance in the existence of a Jewish identity outside of both belief and support for Israel.
"[A] good old-fashioned liberalism, revived and retooled for the challenges of the time"
I would be interested in reading (or being directed to, if you've already written it) more about what this might look like. Both in the specific issue raised by the article and in general.
OK, good post, makes sense, but the question remains--why AREN'T these Jews rededicating themselves to liberalism? What's the obstacle? It's supposedly right there, so why cosplay as the Bund?
Because they inhabit social spheres where declaring yourself a liberal doesn't earn you social status and cosplaying as a 19th century yidisshe-socialist does
Because cosplay socialists are also anti-Capitalist, anti-democracy, anti-liberalism. That's about it. Molly Crabapple is a disingenuous Anzi like Hasan Piker.
As a non-Jew, I think the real issue is how one’s conception of Jewish identity fits liberal democratic values. There is a space for religious identity in western liberal democracies. Ethnicity is much more complicated and sometimes even a non-category. But an ethno-religious nexus that moreover is linked to a foreign state that is inimical to liberal democratic values is clearly incompatible with western modernity. In a sense the Haredim are much less out of step with liberal democratic societies than secular Zionist Jews in the diaspora, who in effect consider themselves to be members of a transnational tribe that has a right to colonise part of the Middle East and view deeply illiberal and anti-democratic Israel as the expression of a supposed “right to self-determination” of their ethno-religious group.
You skipped on two main things - the Bund wasn't anti-Jewish, didn't support genocidal antisemites on the left or the right, and were massacred by both the Nazis and the Soviets. American Anzi Jews for the Genocide of Israeli Jews like Ms Crabapple are part of the antizionist genocidal hate movement that celebrated the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7 2023, the biggest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Nazi SS. The poor working class socialist Bundists would be embarrassed by the Jewish rich-kid luxury belief socialists of NYC and elsewhere standing with Islamist terrorism.
The other thing is that it's pretty odd that you suggest Israel is not liberal, especially when you consider the surrounding countries. Israel is a 78 year-old democracy, longer than most EU countries, including Spain, Portugal and Greece. It has more Muslim citizens than Europe has Jews, and those citizens are integrated all through its society. It is the most multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-racial country in the region. Compare that to the Judenfrei Palestinian Authority West Bank Areas A&B and the 99% Sunni Muslim ethnostate of Hamastan Gaza, perhaps. You might have missed that the Israelis massacred by the invading Palestinians were the most socialist, pro-peace in the country - one of the murdered was B'Tselem board member Vivian Silver. This wasn't by mistake at all.
I have no idea who this post is directed at, as no one on earth seems to be advocating for a replication of the Bund as it existed in Tsarist Russia, and no one fails to recognize that the conditions in the U.S. are not comparable to those in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire.
It feels absurd to even have to type that. The fact is, in 2026, anti-Zionist American Jews, as well as Zionist American Jews who are appalled by the behavior of the Israeli state, are regularly smeared as antisemitic, self-loathing monsters who have been indoctrinated to sever their ties with their Jewishness and the history of their people. A new history of the (largely forgotten) Bund is timely in that it situates Anti-Zionism firmly in the European Jewish tradition and expands our collective understanding of the debates and fissures that persist to this day. I fail to see the downside in engaging with and finding inspiration in a long-ignored but consequential chapter in the history of European and Russian Jewry.
Well, it's possible it was just directed at me -- in which case it won't do very well!
I totally understand the emotional appeal of dissociating oneself from the appalling behavior of the Israeli state, which is currently governed by a coalition that includes outright fascists and which I fear is careening down the slope toward self-destruction.
I just think a politics rooted in that desire for emotional dissociation is a complete and total dead end, and I tried to articulate why. I appear to have done a lousy job!
Nah. It was directed at me too. So there are at least two of us. And I think you did a good job, personally.
Thank you for your reply! I love your newsletter and appreciate your thoughtful response to some gentle pushback
The downside is that it’s a product of narcissistically organized American Jews, and does absolutely nothing to influence Israeli Jews who will decide the future of Zionism. Those are very significant downsides indeed.
‘Narcissistically organized’ is quite an oxymoron.
The current trajectory of Israeli nationalism is suicidal. Permanent militarism is a sickness of the spirit. Every oppressor in history has claimed victimhood to justify their atrocities. Good luck and may God have mercy on your soul
Who is defending Israeli nationalism? This is a post about “Neo-Bundism” and you’re just repeating phrases relating to Israel that have nothing to do with what’s being discussed. Also, I don’t think you know what oxymoron means.
Imagine if you are a left leaning Israeli in 2026. You’ve almost certainly had family members who died protecting the country or in terrorist attacks, and your grandparents came from Holocaust era Europe or middle eastern countries where Jews were viewed as second class citizens. Now, an American Jew, who was lucky enough to get into that country before it shut its doors, is lecturing you about Bundism, which was a total failure. How is that supposed to help you change the direction of Israel?
A soldier I trained lived in the Gaza envelope. He was a serious socialist and backed his son's refusal to be drafted into the IDF. And then both of them had to fight for their lives against a couple truckloads of Hamas commandos invading their village to massacre and abduct its civilians. Nobody has killed the Israeli left, which I used to vote fore, like the Palestinians. In Israel the term regarding the failed peace process, where every land for peace withdrawal was followed by massive terrorism costing thousands of dead and wounded is "sobering up". October 7 2023 has sobered up even the majority of the Israeli socialist left. The ones living in delusion are Anzi progressive Jews of the diaspora, but then again it's no different than the biggest "communists" during the 60s being intellectuals living in Western Europe and the US, who would never, ever move to a Soviet dominated communist country.
The progressive left is just too many retarded rich kids who cosplay being socialist, with no clue of living in a state of war. Moralizing from afar like true dickheads.
The question is what comes next. Do you think annexing Area C and leaving A and B as geographically isolated Bantustans is a good idea? To be fair , I share your skepticism that even a geographically contiguous state would be accepted by the Palestiniains, but the world community would, and if it attacked we would bomb the hell of out of it.
The main thing people misunderstand about Bundism is that besides its socialist commitments it was primarily a Jewish nationalist movement, dedicated to advancing Jewish national interests; Leon Trotsky called them "Zionists with sea-sickness". Such a combination wasn't uncommon in Tsarist Russia, where the main parties advocating for Polish, Ukrainian, Georgian, etc. indepence also professed socialist ideals. But besides American Jews not constituting a distinct national group for which it makes sense to have a nationalist movement, the Neo-Bundists seem to view their movement primarily as a vehicle for solidarity with other people, particularly Palestinians, and not as a vehicle for advancing Jewish interests even with they conflict with the interestst of others.
Indeed, it was the Bund's nationalism that led Lenin to oppose its application to join the Russian Social Democratic Party as an affiliated national organization in the 1903 vote that divided the party into Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.
I think this piece is missing the most crucial point. This "neo-Bundist" moment is driven by a (entirely correct) argument: the centrality of literal Zionism (as in we must take Jerusalem like David took it from the Canaanites) to Jewish life and identity is ahistorical, that for centuries millions of Jews in the diaspora lived and acted with profound indifference to Zionism. I mean, I'm partial to Bundism for obvious reasons. But totally irrespective of the specifics of socialist anti-Zionism, you've got this larger distortion of Jewish history that suggests that essentially every Jew has been dreaming of a return to Palestine since the fall of the second temple. That's not only not true, it's propaganda dreamt up by modern Zionists to support their efforts. The idea that Zionism is a simple continuation of ancient Jewish identity is held by many people, most of them not Jewish. But modern Zionism is less than 200 years old. It's like the Star of David and the assumption that it's the ancient symbol of the Jewish people, a retconning design to support specific political purposes.
If you had asked the average Jew living in New York in 1900 if he was dedicated to the cause of returning to the Holy Land, he would have likely said "...what?" And that stance, the very common stance of indifference to Zionism even within Jewish culture and identity, has been essentially erased thanks to concerted efforts to erase it. But it's crucial context for these debates about Bundism.
The world only spins forward, Freddie, so I think nostalgic anti-Zionist ideologies are a literal waste of time.
That doesn’t mean you have to be a Zionist, whatever that might mean now -- and as you know, I don't think it's obvious what it means, which is a major reason why I am reluctant to call myself a Zionist and why I think more people should be circumspect about applying ideological labels to themselves. It means that, whatever you’re arguing, you’re arguing in the wake of Zionism having succeeded in its primary aims. The next turn is forward from there -- whatever direction you go.
How American Jews should relate to the largest Jewish community in the world and to a state that calls itself a Jewish state are a really good questions to debate. I absolutely do not think that self-professed Zionists get to put a gate on those discussions! But *that* is the subject — not “was this is a good idea in the first place.”
Apart from that, I don't think you're right that for centuries Jews were indifferent to Zionism. Jews could only be indifferent to or attracted to Zionism *once modern Zionism was a thing* -- which is to say, in the modern era. If you go back before modernity, you have to go back to a pre-modern mentality more generally.
Were the Jews caught up in the 17th century cult of Shabtai Zvi "indifferent" to the prospect of returning to the Land of Israel? Not at all! They thought he was the messiah and was going to lead them there miraculously!
Does that mean they were Zionists? No! It means they were pre-modern Jews -- a particular group thereof, mind you. I am not suggesting they were representative in some way of the vast diversity of pre-modern Jewish life.
But, again, it doesn't matter. The world only spins forward.
And sometimes, it spins in directions you don't want it to go....
Indeed. Sometimes it spins that way alarmingly fast . . .
It’s only ahistorical if you consider that Jewish history ended in 1920. But it didn’t and now in the year 2026, Israel exists. The neo-Bundists want to wage some theoretical battle against “Zionism” as if the rest of the 20th century didn’t happen. They are relitigating an intra-Jewish fight that has been asked and answered by history. Even if you or I don’t like the fact that Israel exists, it does; it’s a real place, with real people, who have a language and culture of their own and passports and a military with big bombs that they drop on Palestinians.
So the question for diaspora Jews *now* is how they should relate to the fact of Israel’s existence, and the neo-Bundists response is very much *not* indifference, but rather a kind of inchoate rage and despair at the mere existence of Israel and Israelis (this is, like, the whole point). Want to restart the Bund? Ok — tell us, what your vision is! And remember, it can’t be As a Jew style antizionism, in which Israel remains the entire frame of reference for your identity. These people are the mirror image of the kneejerk Zionists they hate so much.
The backward-looking nostalgia of the neo-Bundists is what ultimately unites them with the most illiberal blood and soil currents of the Palestine solidarity movement. Say what you will about Palestinian fascists though, at least there’s a fantasy of a glorious nation to return to. What do the neo-Bundists want to return to? The week before Hitler’s invasion of Poland? It’s a very unique, 2020s Jewish American kind of mania to imagine the former glory of your people as the moment before they were practically annihilated.
I’ll begin by reiterating Reggie’s question, and no, you didn’t do a bad job of answering it Noah, your academic byway through the obvious was informative and you arrived at the obvious answers.
The Crabapple book is much better than its unfortunate marketing campaign to the AsAJews would suggest, a very straightforward by-the-numbers history, and has very little in common with the bizarre Third Period Stalinist cartoon of Benjamin Balthasser, which frankly is the beginning and end of the idea of the usable past held by Jewish Currents and its circle, which I believe is who you had in mind as prospective serious “neo-Bundists.”
I happen to be right at the relevant moment to all this in my current book project - a history of Menorah Journal, which I’d love the opportunity Noah to discuss with you some time and is very relevant to the larger questions about the American Jewish present and future you raise. What I would say in short is that anyone reading the many dispatches from Europe in the journal from the end of WWI into the rise of the Nazis would have seen the Jewish future there as nothing but bleak, and that the interwar Bund and territorialists had few if any illusions that they weren’t merely advocating a stopgap program for just a fraction of world Jewry going forward.
Finally, just one point of my prickliness over your past cavalier attitude about my first book (and the Menorah Journal book should answer those criticisms of so many moons ago and then some!), on at least one occasion before his death in 1900 Isaac Mayer Wise all but literally verbatim said “the world only spins forward” regarding Herzl et al.
Oh look, an Israel-hating gentile has thoughts about the history and identity of the Jews.
In a recent conversation wrt the new Crabapple book's publication an academic historian (who may or may not be a mutual acquaintance) pointed out that the Bund was non-Zionist not anti-Zionist.
Excellent interview with Molly Crabapple on the Know Your Enemy podcast (one of the best podcasts). Check it out.
I'll start with a quibble: The US and Israel have almost identical Jewish populations, the estimates intersect.
I think Millman misunderstands Crabapple's project. She is not trying to start some sort of neo-Bundism, so the very different circumstances of current US and pre-WW1 E. European jewry is not relevant. She is, to use her own word, obsessed with the history, and she reports young US Jews find it fascinating. I'm a 66 year old US gentile and I find it fascinating as well. Educated people my age know the Warsaw uprising happened, but not necessarily much more than that. It doesn't surprise me that younger people know still less and find it interesting. From the article Millman links to: "Especially young Jews, like in their 20s. They had no idea that Jews had fought back in Europe even before the Holocaust, or they had only vague ideas about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and that Bundists played a major role in it. It was very meaningful for them."
You do not have to share material circumstances with your ancestors to be surprised and inspired by them! Today people are surprised and inspired by ancient Israel, a place with material circumstances far more remote than late 19th century urban Odessa is to us.
Another quote from the article: "Yes. A lot of them were sold a bill of goods about their history, and when they reject that bill of goods, there’s a big hole in them. They don’t have any actual, positive Jewish history. They just have shit they’re ashamed of, because they realize [that Zionism] was actually a history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid. One of the things my book does is give them ancestors."
Perhaps Millman, instead of focusing on differences in material circumstances should think more deeply about the problem Israeli policies are creating among our young. I have a 15-year old son attending a very liberal and diverse high school in Seattle (Franklin). I am shocked by anti-semitism I hear from his friends, and even from my son, I regret to confess. I have to explain that Gaza was not destroyed by "the Jews" but by a very bad man (Netanyahu) leading a country that is blinded by rage. Now he sees Israel intent on bombing the shit out of Iran and S. Lebanon, and he just asked me about a phrase he heard, "mowing the lawn" (ouch). When I explained Zionism to him his first question was (I'll paraphrase) 'OK, so why don't Palestinians get their own country too, the bible?' (He can be snarky).
This is the world our young are experiencing, the idea that learning about the Bund and the Warsaw uprising is irrelevant because they were poor and we are rich seems... Inadequate.
Finally Molly Crabapple attends to the question Millman asks "I would love to understand what significance the Neo-Bundists attribute to the fact that the original Jewish Bund was a total failure". I will point out that losing a good fight doesn't mean you have nothing to teach. We have nothing to learn from the First Jewish-Roman War of 66-73 AD? Masada means nothing because it failed?
Beyond this obvious point I'll pass on what Molly Crabapple said in the interview: Palestine was an English colony! It isn't 550km from Berlin! Had Rommel won at El Alamein all the Jews in mandatory Palestine would have been exterminated just as ruthlessly! The idea that Zionists were right and Bundists were wrong is not proven by a contingent history with vastly larger forces at play where the happy fact that Palestine was strategically important and controlled by a powerful enemy of the Nazis, allied with an America with vast factories beyond the reach of Nazi bombers! History does not offer such simple lessons.
Lots to interact with here! I'll barely scratch the surface.
First, I may regret writing this before reading the book. If so, I'll post a follow-up after I've read it.
Relatedly, as someone who while in middle school wrote a play about Emanuel Ringelblum, I certainly do think it's a good idea to know history! But I may also have a distorted perspective about what people do or don't know already about their own history.
As for Masada: I do not like the cult of Masada! The Jewish revolt was a disaster, and sadly the Jews, in possession of sovereignty once again, have managed to unlearn the most important lessons of that disaster.
And as for WWII: I said nothing at all about the Zionists being vindicated by it. I said American liberalism was vindicated for having prevented America from going totalitarian, as so much of the world did in the 1930s. You are right, of course, that all of history is contingent -- if Japan had attacked the Soviet Union along with Nazi Germany, instead of attacking Pearl Harbor and bringing America fully into the fight, the Axis might have won the war. Who knows? But what's the case that the Bund succeeded anywhere, or might have succeeded?
Finally: I may have the wrong ideas about what to do about it, but I think a lot about how to deal with the effect Israel's policies are having on young people's attitudes toward Jews. I think there's a limit to what Jews in America can do about that. They can try to change the attitudes of Israelis, which requires interacting with them, not cutting them off, and would at best have only a very slow effect. They can engage openly with people who have inclined to tip over into antisemitism, hard though that always is, and again, that would at best have a very slow effect. They can invest more deeply in an *actual* Jewish identity, which is why I suggested going to shul, so that they have an internal strength to deal with antisemitism and to respond to it constructively.
There are also heroic things they could do, like volunteering to monitor human rights abuses in the West Bank, but the overwhelming majority of people won't be heroes. I'm not a hero myself. I admire very much people willing to actually put their bodies on the line in that way. I don't think they would do that without an investment in the Jewish people, and in the fate of Israel. So, again, dissociation probably isn't going to get you there.
Anyway -- if learning about the Bund helps young Jews appreciate the complexity of Jewish history, God bless. I'm in favor of that. I just don't think the Bund is a model for anything particularly useful going forward. It's a failed solution to the problems of a very different time. The Zionist solution to those problems struck most Jews as crazy at the time -- but it *was* a response to those problems, and a coherent one.
As my expereince with my son and his friends shows, learning about the Bund can help young non-Jews as well.
Israel's actions should not feed anti-semitism among our young any more than being anti-Putin justifies hating Russians, but it does. Stereotyping is the way our minds work, it takes continual effort to fight. Human nature being what it is, what to do? The reason my son and his friends care about Gaza more than the Sudan Civil War is US support. US bombs were dropped on apartment buildings. The current Iran War is a US/Israel co-production. There is a lot of reporting that Netanyahu plays Trump to get his way. Various states punish contractors who support BDS.
My explanation to my son, that the US and Israel have far and away the largest Jewish populations, that communal attachment is natural, is utterly unsatisfactory to him. I see it as natural, he says wrong is wrong, it isn't like he doesn't have a point.
A foreign policy that makes aid and alliance with Israel conditional on a sincere committment to a two-state-solution peace process would be the single most effective way to stop the advance of anti-semitism among our young. With Israeli support for a two-state solution polling below 30% such a policy change would effectively end military aid and close military/intelligence ties for years while we wait and hope the Israeli public has a change of heart. That would really take the juice out of expanding left-wing anti-semitism. Israeli bad acts would be seen as the actions of a rogue state, a them thing, not an us thing.
I really don't mean to pick on you, I'm just endlessly shocked about how much propaganda and outright lying has completely warped any clear understanding of this 100-year-old conflict.
To even say something like "[Zionism] was actually a history of ethnic cleansing and apartheid" should mark you as a brainwashed conduit of campus-Left/Soviet Union propaganda, not as any kind of thinker, writer or NYT font of wisdom. This is like letting other people describe you with words written by your worst enemy—light on truth, but packed with hatred. And the same goes for: 'OK, so why don't Palestinians get their own country too?'
All these have simple answers, if people only stepped out of their partisan postures and loyalties and tribal information silos. The "apartheid" smear is of course an obvious lie (originated by the Soviets) and has never been made as any kind of fact claim, but as a moral weapon meant to smear and delegitimize Israel. There is no "apartheid" in Israel (apartheid being a specifically South African system based on racial castes that don't exist in Israel), in fact Israel is the only place in the ME where Arabs have any civil rights and Arabs there live and serve freely in the military, in govt etc. (And that doesn't even include the Ethiopian and other Jews who've found havens there.) And the simple reason they built their "apartheid" wall is that before it was built, suicide bombers were pouring in from the WB to blow themselves up on buses, in clubs and restaurants and murdered 1k Israeli civilians.
And whatever "ethnic cleansing" took place was all a part of the mass shuffling of millions of humans as all world govts were rearranged post-WW2. The Palestinians (a name that didn't exist then) were no more "ethnic cleansed" than were Indians and Pakistanis or the Sudeten Germans or the Christians who were expelled from Turkey, not to mention the 850k Jews expelled from their homes throughout the ME. The only difference is that the Palestinians have refused to move on and prefer to be 4th-generation refugees, to keep hope alive that one day they can reverse the humiliation they felt at the successful establishment of Israel and have their own state "from the river to the sea". There is no "apartheid" and no "ethnic cleansing", these are wicked lies no sane adult should repeat.
And the questions about "So why don't Palestinians get their own country too" and "[Israel's] sincere committment to a two-state-solution peace process" have the same answer. Israel has tried on multiple occasions across decades to make peace with the Palestinians (just in the recent past were Rabin's Contour-for-Peace in 1995, the 2000 Ehud Barak/Clinton peace offer (95% of the WB and all of Gaza!), then Barak’s offer at Taba and Olmert's famous napkin in 2008—all rejected sans counteroffer). I know it's hard for Western liberals to accept this, but the truth has been stated clearly by every Palestinian leader from Hitler's Mullah Hajj Amin al-Husseini to Arafat and Sinwar etc—they don't want their own state, they want to DESTROY the Jewish state. And these aren't my words, but theirs. Every peacenik in the world applauded when Israel abandoned Gaza in 2007 and look how that turned out. 10/7 didn't happen because the Palestinians DIDN'T have their own state, but because they DID.
How can you make a peace deal with someone who doesn't want peace? The only possible response that would appease the Islamic Jew haters and their Western allies (not to to mention the progressive Reform aristocrats of the NYT) would be for Israel to dissolve itself. And thus the conflict continues...
I’m sympathetic to the desire for a diaspora Jewish identity not centered on the state of Israel, pro or con. Viewing bundism as an example does demonstrate that such a thing could potentially exist; viewing it as a model strikes me as a sad and backward facing endeavor.
You do know that the Bund was eliminated by both the Nazis and Soviets, essentially making the Zionist case for the Zionists. The few Holocaust surviving Bundist members mostely made sought refuge in Israel, and admitted they were wrong. I recommend Samuel J Hyde's "What Does Judaism Look Like With Bundism?" https://sjhyde.substack.com/p/what-does-judaism-look-like-with
Yes I do know that and do not look for a reconstitution of the Bund or Bundishness, as I stated. I do look for a diaspora Jewish existence of cultural and religious substance whose members do not live vicariously through the state of Israel. Call me an Ahad ha Amist. I want a healthy relationship between Israel and diaspora in which each can feed off each other. That relationship does not now exist.
This is a really fascinating post that I think engages with the issue pretty fairly. At the very end I think you get to an interesting place about why the Bund is attractive in a way that lot of leftist spaces is not, which is that those in the more communist strains can behave violently towards cultural heritage. Additionally, I think part of the reason people are attracted to stories of the Bund is that we do feel alienated from our Jewishness, and we want to have cultural connection that is not pushing an agenda that we don’t agree with. I personally like religious Judaism! I enjoy the prayers and I live a religious life, but I also feel a little uncomfortable shoehorning politics into religious spaces, so applying Bundist principles helps me reconnect with a Jewish history that is authentically Jewish but not cosmopolitan. This rejects some things about the United States that many of us have issues with, but also reject certain aspects of Zionist thought that many of us have issues with.
Ultimately, trying to replicate the wounded seems disconnected from reality, but mining their theory and practice for applicable principles seems very appropriate. I also am not married to “the Bund” but I am committed to the principles of solidarity with other oppressed groups and living in my Jewish heritage without being deracinated, as well as pursuing like-minded communities.
"I haven't read this book, but have a lot of opinions about people who I imagine have read this book and what I imagine their opinions are about lots of things. I'm going to write a response to these people in my imagination for my buddies and I to feel smug about".
Great post. People seem to forget that Workmen's Circle is right there, or maybe a "No, not like that" mindset kicks in. Neo-Bundists are theater kids to a person, and not in a good way.
My experience, Zionist or no (I agree with you on the limited usefulness of this term in a world where Israel already exists), but someone who doesn’t support many of the recent actions of the Israeli state, is being told by friends and relatives that I am an antisemite and not a real Jew. Since Im not a believer and can “pass”, the question of whether the only function of me claiming a Jewish identity is just being a useful idiot for virulent antisemites is one I worry about myself, too! So I take a history of the Bund not as a model for action today, but as reassurance in the existence of a Jewish identity outside of both belief and support for Israel.
"[A] good old-fashioned liberalism, revived and retooled for the challenges of the time"
I would be interested in reading (or being directed to, if you've already written it) more about what this might look like. Both in the specific issue raised by the article and in general.
OK, good post, makes sense, but the question remains--why AREN'T these Jews rededicating themselves to liberalism? What's the obstacle? It's supposedly right there, so why cosplay as the Bund?
Because they inhabit social spheres where declaring yourself a liberal doesn't earn you social status and cosplaying as a 19th century yidisshe-socialist does
Because cosplay socialists are also anti-Capitalist, anti-democracy, anti-liberalism. That's about it. Molly Crabapple is a disingenuous Anzi like Hasan Piker.
As a non-Jew, I think the real issue is how one’s conception of Jewish identity fits liberal democratic values. There is a space for religious identity in western liberal democracies. Ethnicity is much more complicated and sometimes even a non-category. But an ethno-religious nexus that moreover is linked to a foreign state that is inimical to liberal democratic values is clearly incompatible with western modernity. In a sense the Haredim are much less out of step with liberal democratic societies than secular Zionist Jews in the diaspora, who in effect consider themselves to be members of a transnational tribe that has a right to colonise part of the Middle East and view deeply illiberal and anti-democratic Israel as the expression of a supposed “right to self-determination” of their ethno-religious group.
You skipped on two main things - the Bund wasn't anti-Jewish, didn't support genocidal antisemites on the left or the right, and were massacred by both the Nazis and the Soviets. American Anzi Jews for the Genocide of Israeli Jews like Ms Crabapple are part of the antizionist genocidal hate movement that celebrated the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7 2023, the biggest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Nazi SS. The poor working class socialist Bundists would be embarrassed by the Jewish rich-kid luxury belief socialists of NYC and elsewhere standing with Islamist terrorism.
The other thing is that it's pretty odd that you suggest Israel is not liberal, especially when you consider the surrounding countries. Israel is a 78 year-old democracy, longer than most EU countries, including Spain, Portugal and Greece. It has more Muslim citizens than Europe has Jews, and those citizens are integrated all through its society. It is the most multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-racial country in the region. Compare that to the Judenfrei Palestinian Authority West Bank Areas A&B and the 99% Sunni Muslim ethnostate of Hamastan Gaza, perhaps. You might have missed that the Israelis massacred by the invading Palestinians were the most socialist, pro-peace in the country - one of the murdered was B'Tselem board member Vivian Silver. This wasn't by mistake at all.